Ibm 701, the company's first computer 70 years ago

Fifty years ago, on April 29, 1952, IBM president Thomas J. Watson Jr. revealed in a meeting with shareholders that his company was building "the most advanced high-speed computer in the world."

It was called Ibm 701 and the company produced 19 examples.

Known as the Defense Calculator, it was IBM's first commercial calculator, capable of 2,200 multiplication and approximately 17,000 addition and subtraction per second.

The system used valve logic circuits and electrostatic memory, consisting of 72 Williams tubes with a capacity of 1024 bits each, for a total memory of 2048 words of 36 bits each.

Each of the 72 Williams pipes was three inches in diameter.

With a rent of $ 16,000 per month, the first unit was installed in 1952 at IBM's headquarters in New York City, replacing the Ssec model, the initials of Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator.

The 701 arrived disassembled in eleven pieces, including two electrostatic memory units and three power and distribution units.

The IBM 701 competitor was Univac, designed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, who started development with their company, the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation.

The 701 was the prelude to IBM's technology called Ramac, a magnetic disk to attach to the computer, which allowed data to be read much faster.

In practice, the progenitor of today's hard drives.

The IBM 701 was unwittingly featured in a 1954 photo of what would become the president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, and Herb Grosch, one of the first computer scientists, in the computer room of General Electric, a client company that already used the computer.